SRI's mission is discovery and the application of science and technology for knowledge, commerce, prosperity, and peace.[2]

SRI performs client-sponsored research and development for government agencies, commercial businesses, and private foundations. It also licenses its technologies, forms strategic partnerships, and creates spin-off companies.[3]

SRI has been awarded more than 1,000 patents and patent applications worldwide.[5]

In 1970, SRI formally separated from Stanford University and, in 1977, became known as SRI International. The separation was a belated response to Vietnam war protesters at Stanford University who believed that SRI's DARPA-funded work was essentially making the university part of the military-industrial complex.

In the 1970s, SRI undertook a number of research projects outside of the scientific mainstream, including research into expanded human consciousness and claims of extraordinary human abilities such as those attributed to celebrity psychic Uri Geller (see below).

1950s

In the early 1950s, Walt and Roy Disney sought SRI's advice regarding a small planned amusement park called Disneyland which they intended to build in Burbank, California. SRI provided them information on such topics as location, attendance patterns, and economic feasibility. SRI also selected a much larger site, in Anaheim, and prepared reports covering many aspects of operation. They also provided on-site administrative support and continued an advisory role for some time as the park expanded.

In 1952, the Technicolor Corporation contracted with SRI to develop a near-instantaneous electro-optical alternative to the manual process of timing during film copying. In 1959, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented the Scientific and Engineering Award jointly to SRI and the Technicolor Corporation for their work on the design and development of the Technicolor electronic printing timer which greatly benefited the motion picture industry.

In 1954, Southern Pacific asked SRI to investigate ways of reducing damage during rail freight shipments by mitigating shock to railroad box cars. This investigation led to the development of the Hydra-Cushion technology, which remains standard today.

From 1966 through 1972, SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center developed the first mobile robot to reason about its actions. Named "Shakey", the robot had a television camera, a triangulatingrange finder, and bump sensors. Shakey the Robot used software for perception, world-modeling, and acting. The Artificial Intelligence Center marked its 40th anniversary in 2006.

Hewitt Crane and his colleagues developed the world's first all-magnetic digital computer,[9], based upon extensions to magnetic core memories. The technology was licensed to AMP, who then used the technology to build specialized computers for controlling tracks in the New York City subway and on railroad switching yards.

In the late 1970s social scientist and consumer futurist Arnold Mitchell created the Values and Lifestyles psychographic methodology (VALS) to explain changing US values and lifestyles. VALS was formally inaugurated as an SRI International product in 1978 and was later cited by Advertising Age as "one of the ten top market research breakthroughs of the 1980s."[11]

2000s

In the 2000s, SRI developed, among other things, new uses for diamagnetic levitation; the Deployable Force-on-Force Instrumented Range System (DFIRST), which uses GPS satellites, high-speed wireless communications, and digital terrain map displays to train armored combat units during battle exercises; live-virtual-constructive training systems for the California National Guard; Pathway Tools software, which aims to accelerate drug discovery by using artificial intelligence and symbolic computing techniques to analyze complex biological processes; BioCyc, SRI’s growing collection of genomic databases and software tools used by biologists to visualize genes within a chromosome, complete biochemical pathways, and the full metabolic maps of organisms; the advanced modular incoherent scatter radar (AMISR), a novel relocatable atmospheric research facility under construction for the National Science Foundation; the Centibots, one of the first and largest teams of coordinated, autonomous mobile robots that explore, map, and survey unknown environments; and speech recognition and translation functionality for the VoxTec Phraselator handheld speech translator, which has enabled U.S. soldiers overseas to communicate with local citizens in near real time.

SRI researchers made the first observation of visible light emitted by oxygen atoms in the night-side airglow of Venus, offering new insight into the planet’s atmosphere. SRI education researchers conducted the first national evaluation of the growing U.S. charter schools movement. For the World Golf Foundation, SRI compiled the first-ever estimate of the overall scope of the U.S. golf industry’s goods and services ($62 billion in 2000), providing a framework for monitoring the long-term growth of the industry.

Also in 2006, SRI announced it has selected St. Petersburg, Florida as the site for a new marine technology research facility. SRI St. Petersburg aims to accelerate research and development of technologies related to ocean science, the maritime industry and port security. SRI's expansion into Florida is a collaboration with the University of South Florida College of Marine Science and its Center for Ocean Technology, and is supported by the City of St. Petersburg, Pinellas County, and the State of Florida.

SRI celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2006.

Research outside of the mainstream

Clairvoyance and ESP

In 1972, Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ initiated a series of human subject studies to determine whether participants (the viewers or percipients) could reliably identify and accurately describe salient features of remote locations or targets. In the early studies, a human sender was typically present at the remote location, as part of the experiment protocol. A three-step process was used, the first step being to randomly select the target conditions to be experienced by the senders. Secondly, in the viewing step, participants were asked to verbally express or sketch their impressions of the remote scene. Thirdly, in the judging step, these descriptions were matched by separate judges, as closely as possible, with the intended targets. The term remote viewing was coined to describe this overall process.

In order to explore the nature of remote viewing channel, the viewer in some experiments was secured in a double-walled copper-screened Faraday cage. Although this provided attenuation of radio signals over a broad range of frequencies, the researchers found that it did not alter the subject's remote viewing capability. They postulated that extremely low frequency (ELF) propagation might be involved, since Faraday cage screening is less effective in the ELF range. Such a hypothesis had previously been put forward by telepathy researchers in the Soviet Union.[13]

The first paper by Puthoff and Targ on psychic research to appear in a mainstream peer-reviewed scientific journal was published in Nature in March 1974; in it, the team reported some degree of remote viewing success.[14] One of the individuals involved in these initial studies at SRI was Uri Geller, a well-known celebrity psychic at the time. The research team reported witnessing some of Geller's trademark metal spoon-bending performances, but admitted that they were unable to conduct adequately controlled experiments to confirm any paranormal hypothesis about them.

Electroencephalography (EEG) techniques were also used by team to examine ESP phenomena. In these investigations, a sender, who was isolated in a visually opaque, electrically and acoustically shielded chamber, was stimulated at random by bursts of strobe-light flickers. The experimenters reported that, for one receiver, differential alpha block on control and stimulus trials were observed, which showed that some information transfer had occurred. In contrast, this person's expressed statements of when the stimulus occurred were no different than that which would be expected by chance. The researches were unable to identify the physical parameters by which the EEG effect was mediated.[15]

Psychokinesis

Another series of experiments in the early 1970s focused on psychokinesis, which concerns how human consciousness may influence the behavior of external physical systems. In these studies, the support came from NASA on a contract administered by JPL. They involved building an electronic apparatus that would randomize images presented to an individual, who was asked to predict them in advance. By coupling the randomizer with encouraging feedback and reinforcement for successful predictions, the system was intended to measure how individuals develop their clairvoyance or other telepathic powers. The entire data-gathering process was supposed to be automated, in order to limit the potential for experimenter interference. However, this part of the protocol had been violated for several experiments. A JPL review of the final report noted that, when these parts were omitted from analysis, no evidence of ESP performance could be identified. NASA concluded that there was no basis for further support of this work.[16]

Replication studies

After the publication of these findings, various attempts to replicate the remote viewing findings were quickly carried out. Several of these follow-up studies, which involved viewing in group settings, reported some limited success. They included the use of face-to-face groups,[17][18] and remotely-linked groups using computer conferencing.[19]

The various debates in the mainstream scientific literature prompted the editors of Proceedings of the IEEE to invite Robert Jahn, then Dean of the School of Engineering at Princeton University, to write a comprehensive review of psychic phenomena from an engineering perspective. His paper[20], published in February 1982, includes numerous references to remote viewing replication studies at the time.

Controversy

The descriptions of a large number of psychic studies and their results were published in March 1976, in the journal Proceedings of the IEEE[21]. Together with the earlier papers, this provoked an extended debate in the mainstream scientific literature. Numerous problems in the overall design of the remote viewing studies were identified, with problems noted in all three of the remote viewing steps (target selection, target viewing, and results judging). A particular problem was the failure to follow the standard procedures that are used in experimental psychology.[22]

Several external researchers expressed concerns about the reliability of the judging process. Independent examination of some of the sketches and transcripts from the viewing process revealed flaws in the original procedures and analyses. In particular, the presence of sensory cues being available to the judges was noted[23]. A lengthy exchange ensued, with the external researchers finally concluding that the failure of Puthoff and Targ to address their concerns meant that the claim of remote viewing "can no longer be regarded as falling within the scientific domain"[24][25].

Procedural problems and researcher conflicts of interest in the psychokinesis experiments were noted by science writer Martin Gardner in a detailed analysis of the NASA final report.[26]. Also, sloppy procedures in the conduct of the EEG study were reported by a visiting observer during another series of exchanges in the scientific literature.[27]